So how can Michigan residents help raise needed money for environmental cleanups?

Throw away more bottles and cans, some say.

While the state's top environmental official called such a suggestion "counterproductive," unclaimed bottle deposits remain the only consistent funding source to clean up thousands of polluted sites in Michigan where toxic chemicals threaten drinking water.

The Michigan Department of Environmental Quality gets to keep three-quarters of 10-cent deposits paid on beer and pop containers that go unclaimed each year. In 2006, unclaimed deposits totaled $16.3 million, of which $9.7 million went toward cleanups.

But that funding falls far short of the $95 million DEQ officials say is needed for pollution cleanups in fiscal year 2008-09, which begins Oct. 1.

A Kalamazoo Gazette investigative series late last year examined environmental risks linked to DEQ funding woes. Two months later, no long-term funding solution has been offered.

Consider:

• Starting Oct. 1, the cleanup program will receive only about $15 million, which includes unclaimed deposits and payments from liable polluters.

• Two voter-approved environmental bonds that targeted $760 million for cleanups since 1988 are exhausted.

• Lawmakers cut about $20 million of annual General Fund support for cleanups in 2002; that money has never been restored.

• Overall General Fund support for the department has been cut 68 percent since 2002.

• Facing a $17.5 million shortfall in DEQ's current budget, the Legislature next month is expected to approve an additional $11 million for the department, allowing it "to limp through '08," DEQ Director Steven Chester said.

Since 1990, state figures show the DEQ has received as much as $14 million for cleanups from unclaimed bottle deposits in its best year.

Based on 2006 rates of return, if every man, woman and child in the state each failed to claim an additional 132 deposits, the DEQ could close its $80 million gap in cleanup funding, according to Gazette calculations.

No one in Lansing is seriously suggesting state residents return fewer bottles and cans, but few are putting forward any solution.

"Eighty million is a huge amount of money," Chester said.

Although Chester is hopeful some General Fund dollars may be restored for next year's budget, he was not sure where that money would come from given Gov. Jennifer Granholm's pledge late last year not to raise taxes.

To make up the deficit, Chester said, "it'd be something large like a bond proposal or multiple sources to piece it together. We haven't gotten to the point to figuring out what those will be."

While the environmental community decries the reduction in state dollars for cleanups, they are also wary of issuing new bonds to cover the cost, said James Clift, policy director for the Michigan Environmental Council, a Lansing-based organization.

Additional fees could be placed on mining or water-bottling operations to increase revenue, Clift said. Supporters of those fees say businesses should have to pay more to profit from the state's natural resources.

But new fees may be a hard sell in the Republican-controlled Legislature.
State Sen. Patricia Birkholz, R-Saugatuck, told the Gazette in December that placing additional costs onto the state's businesses would be a mistake.

"I'd be very hesitant to do that right now when we're competing for businesses," said Birkholz, chairwoman of the Senate's Natural Resources and Environmental Affairs committee.

Meanwhile, workers from DEQ offices across the state are trying to drum up grass-roots support for new funding, Chester said.

"There hasn't been a groundswell of concern, but I think it's going to come to a head in the spring of this year," he said.

David O'Donnell, supervisor of the DEQ's cleanup program in southwestern Michigan, said he's met with groups sympathetic to the environment "to use their members as the conduit" to larger audiences.

"I think many folks were unaware of how dire the straits were," O'Donnell said. "We had been hinting, 'We don't have much money, we don't have much money,' but I don't think they realized the immediacy of the issue."

O'Donnell said he expects to make presentations before the Kalamazoo Regional Chamber of Commerce and Kalamazoo Rotary Club.

Chester said he is planning some town-hall-style meetings in the next few months that he hopes will generate support.

"You'll see that the number of people who consider themselves to be environmentalists is astonishing -- it's approaching 80 percent," Chester said. "But support weakens when it comes to new funding."